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THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 



THE HOUND OF 
HEAVEN 

FRANCIS THOMPSON 

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH AND NOTES BY 

MICHAEL A. KELLY, C. S. Sp. 

INTRODUCTION BY 

KATHERINE BREGY 



PETER REILLY, PUBLISHER 

PHILADELPHIA 
1916 



6" 



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Copyright, 1916, Peter E-BiiiLY 



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MAR 25 1916 

©C1.A4277'J3 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 3 

Life of Francis Thompson 9 

The Hound of Heaven 23 

Text and Notes 35 

Bibliography 71 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Poems John Lane Company 

Sister Songs John Lane Company 

New Poems John Lane Company 

The Hound of Heaven Burns and Oates 

Selected Poems, with biographical note by Wilfrid 

Meynell John Lane Company 

Health and Holiness Herder 

Shelley, with an introduction by the Right Hon. 

George Wyndham John Lane Company 

St. Ignatius Loyola Burns and Oates 

Life and Labours of St. John Baptist de la 

Salle Herder 

Works, three volumes .... Charles Scrihners Sons 
Life, By Everard Meynell . Charles Scribner's Sons 
Francis Thompson, the Preston-born poet, by John 

Thompson Herder 



INTRODUCTION 



LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 



INTRODUCTION 

THERE is scarcely another religious poem in 
our language which one would dare to cite 
before the dual, and very different, bars of theology 
and rhetoric as the editor has here cited the Hound 
of Heaven. Indeed, there are very few religious 
poems in any language which would stand that ex- 
acting test. I remember, as a schoolgirl, having to 
analyse, line by line and word by word, the entire 
structure of ^^ Yoii Like It. It seemed like stretch- 
ing a fairy upon the dissecting table! No doubt I 
learned several things from the experiment; but I 
am certain my most lasting discovery was that 
Shakespeare's comedy remained beautiful and blithe 
and alive in spite of the worst that schoolrooms could 
do to it. 

This is the supreme test of greatness — that it 
shall stand all tests : just as it is the supreme test of 
friendship when we cannot know our friends too 
well. And by this test one feels that the present 
attempt has been more than justified. If to instruct 
one soul in Christian faith is to cover a multitude of 
sins, surely to open even one growing mind, even 
one unfolding heart, to the beauties of Christian 
poetry is no small thing. The Rev. Frederick Wil- 
liam Faber pointed out long ago that a taste for 



\ 



4 INTRODUCTION 

reading, rightly directed, was perhaps the greatest 
of all natural aids to spiritual growth. 

All the world knows now that Francis Thompson 
was one of the supreme poets of nineteenth century 
England. And because of his gorgeous imagery, 
his unusual verse — construction, his rich diction and 
his profoundly mystical message, he will stand al- 
most limitless elucidation: moreover these elucida- 
tions, these " corollaries " of his poetry, are gen- 
erally far too vital to be relegated to foot-notes. 
This is the fertility of the annotator's field. Thomp- 
son was no believer in the much-advertised poetry 
of everyday speech. While detesting literary affec- 
tations, he declared once that " To write plainly on a 
fine subject is to set a jewel in wood." Hence we 
find him constantly dropping into sonorous Latin- 
isms, or reviving the forgotten splendors of Eliza- 
bethan English, or dauntlessly coining new words 
for himself. His biographer Mr. Everard Meynell, 
tells us the poet took a half-mischievous interest in 
watching such expressions of his own (' rumorous ', 
' roseal,' 'labyrinthine' were some of them), 
gradually slip into contemporary literature; and 
wonders what he might have thought to hear, some 
two years after his death, many of these very words 
used in the rostrum of English politics. 

All this is very curious and instructive. Yet who, 
in reading the present volume, can fail to feel that 
the value of its notes lies less in their explanation 



\ 



INTRODUCTION 5 

of metre or reference than in their flashes of human 
and even superhuman insight? Such, for instance, 
is the simple observation that the title of Thomp- 
son's poem may seem out of place to those unfamiliar 
with its matter, or to " anyone who has never felt 
the pursuit of God's love." No man can explain a 
great work of art in mere terms of black and white : 
and so at their best these '* notes " are not notes at 
all, but rather meditations. Surely by that name 
must we call the searching and comforting comment 
upon lines 19-20: "The Great Temptation;" and 
apropos of line 114, his remark that "we are all 
Pelagians at heart, and would wish to be able to 
work out our salvation without God's grace ! " 
Again, it is very illuminating to find in the patient, 
profound judgment that is by right the priest's — 
but never by any chance the world's! — Oscar 
Wilde's discovery that God's love is " eternally 
given to that which is eternally unworthy " linked 
with St. Paul's words to the Corinthians on one side, 
and on the other with Thompson's insistent mes- 
sage to modern England. 

The Hound of Heaven is not merely a great piece 
of literature, nor in Coventry Patmore's words 
" one of the very few great odes " in the English 
language: it is also a great page of soul autobi- 
ography. It is universal because it is so sincerely 
personal. And, granting that our tongue endures, 
there seems every reason to believe that men will 
read this poem as long as they continue to read the 



6 INTRODUCTION 

Confessions of St. Augustin, — and for much the 
same reason ! Perhaps because of Francis Thomp- 
son's unhidden frailties, one has the less hesitation 
in laying hold upon his strength. And surely it is 
not alone the Hound, but every page of his work 
and even the record of his troublous life, which 
proves strength to have been the truest part: the 
part, that is, which Francis himself loved and 
willed. He fought from the first against great odds. 
Often, by men's poor judgment, he seemed to fail. 
But he never betrayed nor ever weakly temporised 
his Vision of the Ideal. 

Those who have made the present poem their own 
will pass on joyously to Thompson's other work, 
and will find in its variety the same costly penetra- 
tion of human heart and mind and soul. *' To be 
the poet of the return to Nature is somewhat," he 
once gravely wrote ; " but I would be the poet of 
the return to God ! " When all is said, that is why 
the Hound of Heaven, once a poem for the literary 
elect, is now to be popularised for our schools. 
And the star-crossed singer who delighted to walk 
hand-in-hand with his child- friend through poppy 
fields, and who had such frank predilection for 
" the nurseries of Heaven," would love best to have 
it so. 

Katherine Bregy. 

August, 1915. 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 

1859-1907 

When " In Memoriam " was given to the world 
it was and it still remains a puzzle to the average 
reader because unlike another great English poet 
mourning a similar sorrow the writer passes from 
his sorrow to himself. " Lycidas is dead," and Mil- 
ton cannot get away from the fact ; Hallam is dead, 
and his death is but the prelude of endless discus- 
sion; for behind the sobbing of the poet's soul an 
undercurrent of thought makes itself heard some- 
times doubtful and wavering, sometimes clear and 
thrilling, telling the story of more than a soul in 
pain for the death of a friend. It is rather the 
story of a soul in pain for itself, searching now in 
the broad light of Revelation, now in the darkness 
of Pantheism, the solution of its own existence and 
the solace of its own pain. It is but another chapter 
in a story that is almost as old as the world and 
will grow old with it : 

" Into this Universe, and Why not knowing 
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing." 



10 LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 

Whether, however, it be expressed thus in the sad 
blasphemies of an Omar Khayyam, or resolve itself 
into the pathetic questionings of an Augustin, it 
is for ever and for ever but an echo of the " sad 
sweet music of humanity." But what was to Omar 
only " to-morrow's tangle/' what was only a " rid- 
dle of the painful earth " to Tennyson became to 
St. Augustin not merely the beginning of faith, but 
the most cogent of realities : " Thou hast made us 
for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart will be for ever 
unrested until it rest in Thee." Side by side with 
this grand confession of the saint, the shadowy re- 
sults of the nine years' brooding of Tennyson, — 
" the broken lights "of God, even if they do pre- 
serve all the glamor of poetic beauty, fail utterly as 
a solution of the great problem of life. It is, there- 
fore, with grateful hearts that we turn in an age of 
materialism and voluntary darkness to the cry of 
another soul out of the depths, a cry sometimes as 
troubled and as bitter as that of Omar, sometimes 
as querulous and as pleading as that of Tennyson, 
but always as passionate and as final in its conclu- 
sions as that of St. Augustin. 

It must nevertheless be said that the Hound of 
Heaven remains likewise to many an enigma. The 
vibrant intensity of the poet's feeling leads him fre- 
quently away from the by-paths of current human 
expression. Yet what so many persist in thinking 
exaggeration is but the record of the struggle of a 
soul with what, in an age like ours, when " there 
is no one who thinks in his heart," is also outside 



LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON ii 

of the ordinary current of human feelings. If even 
the Book of the Psalms could now by some strange 
accident fall for the first time into the hands of 
some amateur literary critic, it would run the risk 
of, if not being laid aside in disgust, at least being 
catalogued as something which could find no place in 
the modern trend and development of thought, for 
unfamiliarity with any piece of writing, because 
it is the product either of another time than ours 
or of another spirit than ours furnishes too often 
only a reason for an easy and sympathetic dismissal 
of the same. The Hound of Heaven judged in this 
spirit has more than once been condemned as arti- 
ficial and unreal. Yet to say the truth this poem 
is not only the masterpiece of Thompson but it 
stands out among all the productions of modern 
literature as a masterpiece in itself. A great poem 
in its sublime cadences and its wealth of imagery it 
appeals both to the ear and to the imagination ; it is 
a great poem still more in the sense that the Psalms 
remain the most wonderful poetry of all time for in 
them the Divine Singer fingers in turn every stop 
of the human soul — love, pathos, ecstasy, joy, sor- 
row, repentance and even despair. The Hound of 
iHeaven is indeed the revelation of a soul. But it 
is not the soul of a pagan already conquered by un- 
belief and pessimism for whom life is but 

** A moment's halt — a momentary Taste 
Of Being from the well amid the Waste — 

And lo ! — the phantom caravan has reached 
Jhe Nothing it set out from — . . . ." 



12 LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 

Nor is it the soul of a half christian dilettante 
vaguely whispering to himself: 

" My own dim life should teach me this, 
That life shall live for evermore 
Else earth is darkness at the core 
And dust and ashes all that is." 

But it is the soul of a christian and a man who once 
having felt the mysterious strength of Divine Grace 
is learning or has learned that for the Grace of God 
there can be no substitute. The mask of everyday 
life is off and self-confessed the man stands before 
us with his very heart laid bare, — 

" Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee 
Save Me, save only Me ? " 

That this was or was not the object of Francis 
Thompson when he penned the Hound of Heaven 
cannot be said with certainty, but he certainly must 
have thought and felt what he wrote, else it would 
never have been written. It is, consequently, apart 
almost from the glowing language in which thought 
and feeling have here found expression, this in- 
tensely human element in the poem which is the 
foundation of the universality of its appeal and of 
the immortality of its message. Because, if the 
truth were known, it is the touch of grace, far more 
than the touch of nature, that makes the whole 
world kin. And thus while there exists nowadays 



LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 13 

a certain well-defined tendency to confound mysti- 
cism with the half -sentimental, half-philosophical 
vaporings of would-be poets of humanity, a ten- 
dency to make God and religion things as nebulous 
as their idle dreams, Francis Thompson goes his way 
alone, occupies a position unique, apart, — he is for 
and from all time; and his poem is one of the high- 
est and sweetest expressions of the '' true light which 
enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world," 
that light that shines forever in the darkness and 
which the darkness fails so frequently to compre- 
hend. 



Francis Thompson was born in the town of Pres- 
ton, Lancashire, England, nine days before Christ- 
mas in the year 1859. His father was Charles 
Thompson, a physician, and his mother, a convert 
to Catholicism, was, by maiden name, Mary Mor- 
ton. He was the second of a family of five children, 
of whom only two survived him. His childhood 
was not unhappy, — his mother and his sisters, books 
and toys dividing almost equally his attention, and 
he went, in later years, back frequently to it in 
spirit. At the age of eleven Ushaw College received 
him as one of its pupils, and for seven years under 
the nickname of " Tommy," he, " a shy and unusual 
boy," came into contact with the usual ups and 
downs of English school-boy life. In those days, it 
is related, he was a great reader of books as well as 
of school-books. Destined as he had been, in the 
minds of his parents, for the priesthood, it was 



14 LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 

found that his native indolence and indifference due 
more to lack perhaps of physical health than of any- 
thing else barred him from such a vocation, and it 
was these same faults of character which spoiled 
the next six years of his life spent as a medical stu- 
dent at Owen's College, Manchester. He, while 
there, studied medicine far less than he read poetry, 
and it is probably to his natural predisposition to 
idleness, closing to him the career of either doctor 
or divine, that we are indebted for Francis Thomp- 
son and the Hound of Heaven. He failed, one 
might say " conscientiously," in each of his succes- 
sive examinations for medicine, to the despair of his 
father who, having tried his son at one or two minor 
business ventures calling for less energy and appli- 
cation than a professional career, told him plainly 
at length that "if he could find no other means of 
support, the only career open to him was to enlist 
as a soldier." And a soldier he would have been, the 
last resource of many a carrier e manque e, had he 
been physically fit. 

This natural unfitness for the practical issues of 
life by which Thompson was so much handicapped 
when other young men of his age were hewing their 
way with healthy strokes into the heart of worldly 
success left him friendless and homeless and proved 
for him the source of countless miseries. London, 
the Mecca of all Englishmen, which holds in its heart 
far from the noise and bustle of the world a sanctu- 
ary for its men of genius, cast its spell upon Thomp- 
son also and beckoned him from his home. But 



LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 15 

London so kind to its dead poets was unkind to 
Thompson living. Homeless at home, he fared no 
better in London, for, having carried with him his 
shyness and his lack of physical health what won- 
der if he sank into insignificance and forget fulness 
among the blatant thoroughfares and the robust life 
of the city. He has preserved for us a record of at 
least one strange kindness done him in his darkest 
hour of need. But, another who befriended him (as 
he befriended others) in giving him work to do, (a 
certain Mr. McMaster), was compelled to say of 
him : " Thompson was my only failure." And al- 
though he does refer to a certain habit of prayer by 
Thompson, he hints openly that the latter had at 
that time fallen away from the practices of the 
Catholic faith. Indeed, it would seem that Francis 
Thompson's religion, nominally Catholic, was con- 
sciously or unconsciously of the type of Catholicism 
that cannot be found in churches. " He., lov-ed " 
ney^rtheks.sJ^Jjie_.beauty of the house of God," and 
no poet perhaps ever divined as well the mystical 
meaning of the pomp of the Church's liturgy. A 
holiday at home which left him more shiftless than 
ever was followed by his dismissal from the work- 
shop of his benefactor. What he suffered then, 
eking out an existence as a shoe-black, as a seller of 
matches, as a cab-caller in the streets of London, is 
best known only to himself, but the suffering with 
all its attendant horrors, it cannot be denied was of 
his own choosing and making. Of all the circum- 
stances that contributed to his misery the greatest 



i6 LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 

was himself It was, however, only as a 

Gethsemani, a darkness before the dawn, and from 
it at length, he too 

" rose and past 

Bearing a lifelong hunger in his heart " — 

a hunger for God. Because from the memory of 
those very days, beautiful as a rose blooming upon a 
grave, came, fragrant with repentance, and with 
hope, radiant with light and color a masterpiece of 
song. The Hound of Heaven tells of a heart that is 
still bleeding from the struggle but which bleeds no 
longer in vain; it is the rose of the tombs yielding 
its perfume. 

The light and strength came to Thompson, it 
might be said, from the date of the publication in 
Merrie England (a review edited by Mr. Wilfrid 
Meynell, and dedicated to criticism literary as well 
as artistic) of an article of his called " Paganism — 
Old and New." Thompson had looked for a pub- 
lisher only, and found instead a friend and a family 
of friends. Little by little, his shattered body was 
restored to a minimum of health and his poor soul 
was freed from its loneliness. Yet the crisis through 
which he had passed left him for the remainder of 
his days always vacillating and hesitating, intensi- 
fied his disposition to laziness, and marked him out 
as a model of unpunctuality. It is from this date 
(1888) that he began to take his place in literature, 
the " Ode to the Setting Sun " having been published 



LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 17 

about this time. One of the most wonderful essays 
of modern times, — his essay on Shelley, was re- 
jected by the Dublin Review and did not appear 
until twenty years later, after the poet's death, to 
be acclaimed at that late date as the " most import- 
ant contribution made to English Literature for 
twenty years." " Sister Songs " began to take shape, 
and the Hound of Heaven was written in 1891 (pub- 
lished, however, only in 1895). A book-notice of 
Thompson's on General Booth's " Darkest Eng- 
land " poignant with bitter memories of his own 
darkness when under the " bashless inquisition of 
each star," he had himself 

" Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour 
In night's slow-wheeled car," 

brought to Thompson the notice of Cardinal Man- 
ning, and the unqualified approbation of Mr. W. T. 
Stead then enjoying his world-wide reputation as 
a journalist and editor of the " Review of Reviews." 
The year 1892 saw Manning in his grave and 
Thompson wrote his lines " To the Dead Cardinal of 
Westminster." 

For some time Francis Thompson was on the 
journalistic staff of the Weekly Register (another 
paper of Mr. Meynell's) but he was, as often as not, 
a disappointing contributor, failing repeatedly to be 
in time with his " copy." In 1892 he betook himself 
to the Franciscan Monastery at Pantasaph, in Wales, 
where, already Franciscan in simplicity and in name, 



i8 LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 

he found himself very much at home. He moved 
later to a cottage hard by ; and the influence of asso- 
ciation with learned and pious men of God, his long 
walks in the country and the open air, together with 
the wholesome silence of the place, accomplished a 
wonderful change in the poet, and brought about in 
a great measure what the sympathy of Mr. Meynell 
had already begun, for, thenceforward, although 
bodily health was never his to any very marked de- 
gree, he began to be remembered by his friends for 
a laugh as graceful and as lighthearted as any child's. 
The Meynell family, to whose kindness and sym- 
pathy, based on a perfect understanding of one who 
never, perhaps, understood himself, every reader 
and lover of Thompson is almost as much indebted 
as was the Poet himself, will go down in the history 
of letters not only as a family richly endowed with 
the genius which we call literature, but, if it were 
possible, more richly endowed with the genius which 
we call appreciation. And, perhaps, had his father 
understood the seeming waywardness of Francis as 
a student but half as well as his friends did his 
shabbiness and his shiftlessness of later years no one 
would ever have had to deplore or to excuse his mis- 
takes. To the eternal credit of Francis Thompson 
it must be said that he responded fully to their sym- 
pathy and never once betrayed their trust; and if it 
be true that all things are done on earth as well as in 
heaven by love, the truth has been once more ex- 
emplified in the remodelling and remaking of the life 
of Francis Thompson. It was during this stay at 



LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 19 

Pantasaph that the poet's father died without seeing 
him, and that Thompson met Coventry Patmore for 
the first time. Nothing could exceed Patmore's 
graceful friendliness to his coming brother-poet; 
and when Patmore died in 1896, Thompson feeling 
his death very acutely went back to London, where, 
during the closing years of his own life, mainly 
through the kindness of the Meynells, he made the 
acquaintance of most of the literary celebrities of the 
time. 

For several years Thompson worked steadily and 
unsteadily at reviewing and journalism under one 
form or another on the staff now of the Academy, 
now of the Athenaeum, now of other periodicals. 
But the work by which he is best remembered was 
already done. His letters about this time are many 
and beautiful, beautiful just as much in what he 
wrote in them by way of digression as in what he 
would expressly wish to write. His pocket and his 
wardrobe were in constant danger of being empty, 
but neither the emptiness of his pocket nor the scanti- 
ness of his wardrobe had further effect on him than 
to occasion sometimes a childlike impatience. The 
comparison of his poverty to that of St. Francis of 
Assisi, although ingenious and sympathetic, has, 
however, but one main foundation, namely, poverty ! 
They were both poor; but Francis Bernardone was 
poor by set choice and purpose, while Francis 
Thompson was poor by accident and indolence. 
Poverty to the one was the basis of. a divine life, to 
the other it was but a helpless condition of exist- 



20 LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 

ence. To say, nevertheless, that they had nothing in 
common, would be wrong ; both arrived at the same 
point, detachment, but through ways as differing and 
different as prodigality differs from charity. 

Francis Thompson's health, never of the robust 
type, was frequently to him a source of preoccupa- 
tion ; and the battling of this poor soul, so little fitted 
for the practical things of life, against the exigen- 
cies of money matters did not now ameliorate his 
condition. Little by little he failed visibly. De- 
spondent days and dark hours hurried him likewise 
to the end. His Franciscan friends never forgot 
him and invited him to rest with them. But the 
hand of the dreadful disease. Consumption, was at 
his throat, and neither care nor kindness, both of 
which were lavished upon him, first by Mr. Blunt 
at his place in Sussex, afterwards by Sister Michael 
at the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth, could 
lengthen his sojourn upon earth. Death came to him 
on November 13, 1907, and his body was laid to 
rest in St. Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green. Never 
of any one man perhaps were the words of Gray's 
epitaph more true : '' He gave to misery (all he had) 
a tear," — it was the Hound of Heaven, — " He 
gained from heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend," 
and the friend was Mr. Wilfrid Meynell. 

M. A. K. 
Cape May Point, 

August 15, 1915. 



THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 



THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 
By Francis Thompson 

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; 
I fled Him, down the arches of the years; 
T fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways 

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears 
I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
Up vistaed hopes, I sped ; 
And shot, precipitated, 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 

From those strong Feet that followed, followed 
after. 

But with unhurrying chase, lo 

And unperturbed pace. 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy. 

They beat — and a Voice beat 
More instant than the Feet — 
" All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." 

I pleaded, outlaw- wise, 
By many a hearted casement, curtained red, 
Trellised with intertwining charities; 



24 THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 

(For, though I knew His love Who followed, 

Yet was I sore adread 20 

Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside) 
But, if one little casement parted wide, 

The gust of His approach would clash it to. 
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue. 
Across the margent of the world I fled. 

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars. 
Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars; 
Fretted to dulcet jars 
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon. 
I said to dawn : Be sudden ; to eve : Be soon — 30 
With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over 
From this tremendous Lover! 
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see ! 

I tempted all His servitors, but to find 
My own betrayal in their constancy. 
In faith to Him their fickleness to me. 

Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit. 
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue; 
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind. 

But whether they swept, smoothly fleet, 40 
The long savannahs of the blue; 

Or whether. Thunder-driven, 



THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 25 

They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven, 
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' 
their feet: — 
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue. 
Still with unhurrying chase, 
And unperturbed pace. 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 

Came on the following Feet, 50 

And a Voice above their beat — 
" Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter 
Me." 

I sought no more that, after which I strayed, 

In face of man or maid; 
But still within the little children's eyes 

Seems something, something that replies. 
They, at least, are for me, surely for me ! 
I turned me to them very wistfully; 
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair 

With dawning answers there, 60 

Their angel plucked them from me by the hair. 
" Come then, ye other children, Nature's — share 
With me" (said I) "your deHcate fellow- 
ship; 



26 THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 

Let me greet you lip to lip, 
Let me twine with you caresses, 

Wantoning 
With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses, 

Banqueting 
With her in her wind-walled palace, 
Underneath her azured da'is, 70 

Quaffing, as your taintless way is, 
From a chalice 
Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring." 

So it was done : 
I, in their delicate fellowship was one — 
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies. 

/ knew all the swift importings 
On the wilful face of skies; 
I knew how the clouds arise, 
Spumed of the wild sea-snor tings ; 80 

All that's born or dies 
Rose and drooped with; made them shapers 
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine — 
With them joyed and was bereaven. 
I was heavy with the even, 
When she lit her glimmering tapers 
Round the day's dead sanctities. 



THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 27 

I laughed in the morning's eyes. 
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather, 

Heaven and I wept together, 90 

And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine; 
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart 
I laid my own to beat, 
And share commingling heat; 
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart 
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek. 
For ah ! we know not what each other says, 

These things and I; in sound / speak — 
Their sound is but their stir, they speak in silences. 
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my 
drought ; lOO 

Let her, if she would owe me, 
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me 

The breasts o' her tenderness : 
Never did any milk of hers once bless 
My thirsting mouth. 
Nigh and nigh, draws the chase. 
With unperturbed pace. 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy. 
And past those noised Feet 



28 THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 

A Voice comes yet more fleet — no 

"Lo! naught contents thee, who content' st 
not Me." 

Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke! 

My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me, 

And smitten me to my knee ; 

I am defenceless utterly. 

I slept, methinks, and woke, 
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep. 
In the rash lustihead of my young powers, 

I shook the pillaring hours 
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with 
smears, 120 

I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years — 
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. 
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke, 
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream. 

Yea, faileth now even dream 
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist ; 
Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist 
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist, 
Are yielding; cords of all too weak account 
For. earth, with heavy griefs so overplussed. 130 



THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 29 

Ah ! is Thy love indeed 
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed, 
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount? 
Ah ! must — 
Designer infinite! — 
Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn 

with it ? 
My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust ; 
And now my heart is as a broken fount. 
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever 

From the dank thoughts that shiver 140 

Upon the sighful branches of my mind. 

Such is; what is to be? 
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind ? 
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; 
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
From the hid battlements of Eternity, 
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then 
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again j 
But not ere Him Who summoneth 
I first have seen, enwound 150 

With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned; 
His Name I know, and what His trumpet saith. 
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields 



so THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 

Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields 
Be dunged v^ith rotten death? 
Now of that long pursuit 
Comes on at hand the bruit; 
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea: 
" And is thy earth so marred, 
Shattered in shard on shard? l6o 

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me ! 

Strange, piteous, futile thing! 
Wherefore should any set thee love apart? 
Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He 

said), 
" And human love needs human meriting : 

How hast thou merited — 
Of all man*s clotted clay the dingiest clot? 

Alack, thou knowest not 
How little worthy of any love thoui art! 
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, 170 

Save Me, save only Me? 
All which I took from thee I did but take, 

Not for thy harms. 
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. 

All which thy child's mistake 



THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 31 

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home : 
Rise, clasp My hand, and come." 

Halts by me that footfall; 
Is my gloom, after all. 
Shade of His hand, outstretched caress- 
ingly? 180 
" Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, 
I am He Whom thou seekest ! 
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me." 



TEXT AND NOTES 



TEXT AND NOTES 



1-6. I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; 
I fled Him, down the arches of the years; 
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways 

Of my own mind ; and in the mist of tears 
I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
Up vistaed hopes, I sped; 

1 An. echo of Psalm 138. Cf . v. 7 : " Whither shall I go 
from Thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy face? " 

Fled Him. — i. e., fled from Him. The expression is 
stronger. 

Nights, days, years. — He fled from God all the time 
of his life. 

2. Arches. — Addison, in his ** Vision of Mirza," represents 
life as an immense ocean, spanned by a bridge, both ends 
of which are lost in the mists of eternity. The arches of 
this bridge are the years. Here, however, the metaphor 
represents rather a succession of arches or archways 
through which the soul flies from God. 

3. Labyrinthine ways of the mind is a fitting expression, 
because we are only too often deluded by our own conceits, 
and " in wandering mazes lost." The word " labyrinth " 
means a maze. The original Labyrinth is in the Mythol- 
ogy (Gr.). In it was a monster — the Minotaur, half man, 
half bull — to whom a yearly tribute of human lives was 
paid. He was slain by Theseus who, by means of a silken 
thread held at the entrance by Ariadne, was guided back to 
freedom. (Ovid.) The earliest and most renowned laby- 
rinth was, however, in Egypt, near Lake Moeris; it was 
half under ground, and contained 3000 apartments. 



36 TEXT AND NOTES 

4. Mist of tears. — Tears, when they are like the tears of 
Christ — " And Jesus wept " — i. e., tears of expiation, atone- 
ment and sympathy, draw us closer to God. They are no 
mist; all other tears are the mist that hides us from God, 
and God from us. Yet Louis Veuillot says : 

" For there are things our weakling eyes can never see 
But through their tears." (Trans.) 

5. Running laughter. — We say "rippling" laughter. If 
there are tears which hide us from God, there is, likewise, 
a joy — the joy that is not " in the Lord " — where God never 
dwells. 

6. Vistaed. — A curious adjective, coined from the word 
"vista." Vista is the Italian word for a view. The more 
usual sense of the word is an open space in a wood (or a 
prospect through an avenue, as of trees) well-lighted in com- 
parison with the surrounding gloom ; hence vistaed hopes, 

7-15. And shot, precipitated, 

Adown Titantic glooms of chasmM fears, 

From those strong Feet that followed, followed 
after. 
But with unhurrying chase, 
And unperturbed pace. 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
They beat — and a Voice beat 
More instant than the Feet — 
" All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." 

7-8. Titanic. — Titan was a name in the Greek Mythology 
given to any one of the six sons and six daughters of 
Uranus (heaven) and Gaea (earth). After having been 
hurled from heaven into nether darkness by Jupiter, they 
were assisted in their struggle with him by the hundred- 
handed giants. Titanic means, therefore, monstrous or re- 
bellious. Fear, too, is a monster, condemned to perpetual 
glooms; it is, besides, the great danger, the precipice the 
soul must avoid in its way to God, — chasmM fears. "It 
is I, fear not," says the Lord. 



TEXT AND NOTES yj 

9. Strong Feet.— The powerful, pursuing Feet of God, 
the Hound of Heaven. This name was given to God by 
Thompson only on account of this beautiful attribute of 
God, so vividly brought home to us in the Good Shepherd, 
namely, His pursuit of souls — swift, keen, untiring, as the 
greyhound after the hare. The name is new, strange, and 
out of place for anyone who has not read the poem, or better 
still, for anyone who has never felt the pursuit of God's 
love. 

Followed. — The repetition of the word indicates the 
insistency of the pursuit. 

10-12. Onomatopoeia. The words describe admirably the 
slow, undisturbed, deliberate, majestic pursuit, so worthy 
of a God Who is a God of strength, — of the strength that 
"can wait." Unhurrying chase is identical with deliberate 
speed; and unperturhdd pace (slow, measured tread) con- 
veys the same idea as majestic instancy, and the juxtaposi- 
tion of these words gives us an admirable instance, also of 
the figure of speech known as "oxymoron" or "paradox." 

13. They.— The Feet of God. 

Beat. — Throbbing like a pulse. The " beaten " track. 

14. Instant. — For instantly, i. e., insistently. Latin "in- 
stare" — to press upon. 

15. The whisper of God to the soul. Betray is a hard 
word. But because God is the alpha and the omega, the 
first and the last, everything (and it is the history of every 
soul) is bound to disappear from us, betray us, sooner or 
later, everything except God, more especially if we are 
false to God, and betray Him. 

16-18. I pleaded, outlaw-wise. 

By many a hearted casement, curtained red, 
Trellised with intertwining charities; 

16. Pleaded. — Begged for (love). 

Outlaw-wise. — Like an outlaw or an outcast. John 
Howard Payne, author of the old ballad, "Home, Sweet 
Home," is said to have died, starving and homeless, within 



38 TEXT AND NOTES 

earshot of a drawing-room in which his song was being 
sung. Imagine his feelings, and those of our poet, hunger- 
ing and homeless for love. Leaving himself, Thompson 
seeks (in lines 16, 17 and 18) to hide himself from heav- 
enly love in the loves of the earth. Later, (in line 52) he 
shall be obliged to relinquish them, 

17. Casement. — A poetic word for window; cf. Keats 
(Ode To a Nightingale) : 

" Perhaps this self -same song 

hath 

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 

Hearted, curtained red. — Both indicate the ruddy 
glow of love, and have reference undoubtedly to lovers' 
scenes at windows, many of which are classical ; cf . Shake- 
speare (Romeo and Juliet) ; Tennyson (Maud) ; serenades. 

18. Trellised. — Agrees with casement, like hearted and 
curtained red, and, like them, partakes of the transferred 
epithet inasmuch as the window was only the scene of the 
protestations of love. Trellised — adorned with trellises, — 
a sort of crisscross woodwork. The word as it is used 
here, however, presumably refers to the protestations of 
love crossing and recrossing like trellis-work. 

Intertwining. — Like vines or ivies. This word bears 
out the idea conveyed in trellised. 

Charities. — Charity is a higher name for love, but has 
come to mean anything done through charity, i. e., for the 
love of God, such as an alms given to the poor. 

19-23. For, though I knew His love Who followed. 
Yet was I sore adread 
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside, 
But, if one little casement parted wide, 
The gust of His approach would clash it to. 

19-21. THIS IS THE GREAT TEMPTATION.— The fear 
that, if we love God as God deserves to be loved, we can or 



TEXT AND NOTES 39 

could love no one else. But, — our love can be of two kinds, 
either admitting no increase or degree, (i.e., to love above 
all else in reality) or simply affective, (i. e., being solely in 
the affections, and consequently, admitting increase or de- 
crease). In other words, our love may be purely spiritual, 
residing in the soul, and ruled by the reason, or it may be, 
as it is, alas, too often, when its object is what we can see 
and feel, in the heart alone. Pascal, in his " Pens§es," has 
made the distinction beautifully : " Le coeur a ses raisons 
que la raison ne connait pas " — " the heart has reasons the 
reason knows nothing of," i. e., reasons for loving. The love 
we should have for God is, of course, like all our loves, 
usually in the heart also, but not necessarily. It suffices to 
love Him with our reason, that is, to have the disposition 
never to offend Him by mortal sin. To fear loving God 
above all, " least we should have naught beside " bears with 
it its own punishment, for it causes us to love nothing at 
all; not God, for fear we may have no other love, and not 
man, for fear of offending God ; and the punishment is lone- 
liness for time and for eternity. 

19. His love. — The great love of God for us, which satis- 
fies the soul completely. 

Who — has for antecedent " His " — i. e., " of Him." 

20. Adread. — Afraid, dreading or adreading. Cf. afish- 
ing, awalking: the prefix "a" denotes continuity of ac- 
tion. 

21. Naught. — Nothing. For aught (anything) and 
naught (nothing), the Lancashire people where Thompson 
was born say commonly " owt " and " nowt." 

22-23. This poem is full of sobs, and these lines are one 
of them. The metaphor is easy to understand for anyone 
who has ever wished to give his heart to God, the windows 
just opening and disclosing the smiles and blushes of the 
loves of the earth, closed with a bang by the gust of God's 
approach. It sufficed only to hear the approach of God to 
have the love just born die out. The cause of this is, how- 
ever, usually indirect apparently, but it is always a move- 



40 TEXT AND NOTES 

ment of God's grace : " My son, give Me thy heart ! " Often, 
it is the constancy of the creature to God — the creature 
that would be beloved and finds it cannot, it must not, for 
God has called it, too. (See lines 34-37). 

24-33. Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue. 
Across the margent of the world I fled, 

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars, 
Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars; 

Fretted to dulcet jars 
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon. 
I said to dawn: Be sudden; to eve: Be soon — 
With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over 
From this tremendous lover! 
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see! 

24. Fear trying to escape was powerless, or at least, less 
powerful than God's love pursuing. 

Wist. — Old English, " witan " — to know. We say : 
"to wit" (meaning "for example"), to "lose one's wits." 
Cf. Mark ix. 6 (Protestant Bible) "For he wist not what 
to say," and the German proverb, " Ohne, Wissen, Ohne 
Sunde," — " Where there is no knowledge there is no sin." 

Evade. — Avoid, escape. Latin, " vado " — I go. 
25-33. Change of scene from earth to heaven, but it is 
not yet the heaven of God and of His Saints. The passage 
is obscure. He seeks to hide himself from God amid the 
" Harmony of the Spheres." 

Margent — is archaic for margin, marge, edge, border. 
26. Troubled. — With repeated knockings, like the man in 
the Gospel who was knocking for bread, not shelter. 

Gold gateways of the stars. — ^The outposts of heaven. 
The stars have a fascination for even the most restless 
minds. This metaphor of the gateway of the stars as the 
outposts of heaven may be said to have an echo in Camp- 
bell's " The sentinel stars set their watch in the sky," ( Sol- 
dier's Dream), and Bret Harte, speaking of a star falling 
and going out of the sky, says that when he saw it he 



TEXT AND NOTES 41 

thought that " God somewhere had relieved a picket," 
(Relieving Guard). Nature, in all its forms, is a real gate- 
way to God — " The heavens shew forth the glory of God 
and the firmament declareth the work of His Hands." 
(Psalm xviii). 

27. Smiting. — Beating heavily and repeatedly. 

Clanged. — The golden bars of the gateways ring, rat- 
tle and clang when he hammers upon them to open and 
yield him shelter. 

2S. Fretted. — Bears out the idea of discord contained in 
dulcet jars. To fret means to worry. Fretwork is any 
work (usually in wood or iron) which has the appearance 
of being jagged or irregular, yet on the whole symmetrical. 
Dulcet. — Sweet, — old French, " doulce." 
Jars. — Expresses any harsh sound or feeling that 
grates on the nerves. Italian, " garrire " — to rebuke. Cf. 
French, " guerre " — war, and Anglo-Saxon, " Yrre " — angry. 
Verb ' to jar ' is used in the sense of " to quarrel " or " to 
wrangle," or even " to vibrate regularly as a pendulum," 

(Shakespeare). 

29. Silvern. — Made of silver, or silvery (as of silver). 
Chatter. — Idle talk, prattle, noise made by magpies, 

1. e., meaningless, brainless; cf. Tennyson (The Brook) : 

" I chatter, chatter, as I flow 
To join the brimming river." 

Silvern chatter. — Silver bells have a distinctly musi- 
cal sound, and perhaps this is the idea the poet had in mind. 
The word " jar " is used as of bells ringing together. He 
rings the bells at the doors of the skies. 

Pale ports o' the moon. — We say the " silver " moon, 
as well as the " pale " moon. Cf. Mrs. Caroline Norton 
(Bingen on the Rhine) : "The . . . moon rose . . . her 
pale light seemed to shine." Po7'ts is for portals, gateways, 
O' for " of " is archaic and colloquial. Cf. " jack o' lan- 
tern," " what o'clock is it." 

30. Another echo of Psalm 138. Cf. vv. 11, 12: "And I 
said, ' Perhaps darkness shall cover me ; and night shall be 



42 TEXT AND NOTES 

my light in my pleasures. But darkness shall not be dark 
to thee, and night shall be as light as day: the darkness 
thereof, and the light thereof are alike (to Thee).'" 
Neither the dawn nor the evening can, therefore, hide him 
from God. When it is night, he longs for the day to come 
to do it, and in the day he sighs for the night. It is this 
persistent Presence of God, of the God from Whom he is 
fleeing, which gives the great pathos to the poem. 

31. Addressed to the evening. The skyey blossoms are 
the stars. Cf. Longfellow (Evangeline) " Blossomed, the 
lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels." 

Heap me over. — To hide him from God. 

32. Tremendous Lover. — Oxymoron. Cf. Horace : " Splen- 
dide mendax" — magnificently false, (spoken of Hy- 
permnestra, who deceived her father in not killing her hus- 
band as he commanded). God is, indeed, a tremendous 
Lover, — this is an expression which will live. 

83. Vague veiL — Of darkness. (Possibly clouds, also). 
Cf. LoNgfellow (Hymn to the Night) : 

" I heard the trailing garments of the Night 
Sweep through her marble halls!" 
Lest He see. — A sob! 

34-45. I tempted all His servitors, but to find 
My own betrayal in their constancy, 
In faith to Him their fickleness to me, 

Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit, 
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue; 
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind. 
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet, 
The long savannahs of the blue; 

Or whether, Thunder-driven, 
They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven, 
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' 

their feet: — 
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue. 

34-37. More than one man has been brought to God by 



TEXT AND NOTES 43 

the constancy (to God) of those he loves. They would not 
be tempted, because no one can serve fully and perfectly 
two masters. Our betrayal, our fickleness, our treachery, 
our deceit — no matter how they look or may be criticised, — 
to creatures, are or should be the measure of our constancy, 
our faith, our trueness, our loyalty to God. Tauler, the 
great German divine, was asked when did he find God, and 
he promptly replied : " When I left creatures." These 
lines are also an example of oxymoron or paradox — traitor- 
ous trueness^ etc., a figure of speech common enough. Cf. 
Tennyson (Elaine — Idylls of the King) : 

" but now 

The shackles of an old love straightened him, 

His honor rooted in dishonor stood. 

And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." 

38-44. He seeks shelter from, or forgetfulness of God in 
the whirl of the winds of heaven, making appeal to their 
swiftness, — the mad hope, nowadays, to stifle the voice of 
conscience, to kill the pulsations of the Holy Ghost in the 
excitement of the world. In those lines we have the whistle, 
the sweep, and the howl of the storm very aptly described 
by the words. This is called " onomatopoeia." In his " Es- 
say on Criticism," Pope describes onomatopoeia thus: 

" *T is not enough no harshness gives offense, 
The sound must seem an Echo to the sense: 
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows. 
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; 
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, 
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar; 
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, 
The line, too, labors, and the words move slow, 
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain. 
Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main." 

In line 39, it is the whistle, in 40 and 41, it is the sweep, 
in 42-44, it is the full rage and howl of the storm. 



44 TEXT AND NOTES 

38. Sue. — Appeal to, pursue. Cf. French, '* suivre " — to 
follow. 

39. Mane. — As of a horse or lion in flight — ^it is a pretty 
figure: wind-horses. 

40. The alliteration in sivept and smoothly echoes the 
sense. 

41. Savannahs. — Spelled also "savanna." (Spanish, 
"Sabana"). A long, low, open plain or meadow, a prairie, 
covered with tall grasses. The effect of the breezes over 
cornfields is classical, and " savannahs of the blue " is such 
a sweet expression for the limitless skies ! 

42. Thunder-driven. — A word full of power. It is the 
howl of the storm. 

43. Clanged. — A strange word here, referring to the clash 
of the storms. We can imagine the chariot buffeted by 
them, although clanged is active voice. 

Chariot. — God riding in the winds. Pope (Essay on 
Man) speaks of the savage 

" Whose untutored mind 

Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind." 

'Thwart. — Athwart or across. Contains the idea of 
impeding free progress. Tennyson (Palace of Art) uses 
"rock-thwarted" of waves: 

" And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves." 

44. Plashy. — Literally, watery. Agrees with heaven. 
The idea is very beautiful: we can see the lightnings 
splashed and scattered by the wheels and the hooves of the 
horses like water on the streets on a very wet day. Gold- 
smith (Deserted Village) speaks of the "plashy spring" 
where the water-cress is gathered. Also cf. Milton : " He 
filled up unsound and plashy fens." 

Flying lightnings. — Splashed from the wheels. 
Spurn o* their feet. — A classical form of expression 
of great beauty, used here for spurning feet. 

45. This line closes up the new attempt to escape God, for 
no matter how the wind blew, Love was stronger than fear. 



TEXT AND NOTES 45 

46-60. Still with unhurrying chase, 

And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
Came on the following Feet, 
And a Voice above their beat — 
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter 
Me." 

I sought no more that after which I strayed 

In face of man or maid; 
But still within the little children's eyes 

Seems something, something that replies, 
They, at least, are for me, surely for me! 
I turned me to them very wistfully; 
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair 

With dawning answers there, 
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair. 

46-50. The recurrence of these wonderful lines admirably 
bears out the idea of the poem, besides giving it a most 
artistic effect, like a ' motif ' constantly recurring in some 
grand piece of music. Longfellow, in " King Robert of 
Sicily," notes the effect also in the chant of the " Magnifi- 
cat." The proud king hears constantly recurring like a 
" burden or refrain," like " the throbbing of a single string,'* 
the words : 

" He has put down the mighty from their seat, 
And has exalted them of low degree." 

50. The Voice beat more insistently before; now, it is 
alove the Feet. God is gaining on the fugitive. 

51. Shelters. — This is the second whisper of God, and It 
is full of pity. Betray was hard. 

52-60. The scene changes again. He thinks the love of 
children would make him happy, and so enable him to for- 
get God. 

52-53. This is the great step towards FINDING GOD ! 



46 TEXT AND NOTES 

Father Faber says that God loves to come to lonely hearts, 
to hearts that have broken with everyone, even the grave 
of father and mother, adding that God so often knocks at 
the door of our hearts for entrance, and is denied, for " we 
have company," and then He goes away, not angrily but 
sorrowfully. 

52. That after which I strayed. — ^This is a piece of self- 
accusation. Thompson wanted God, as we all do, but he 
did not know it. Strayed is, therefore, correct. Besides, 
it is the cry of the fruitless repentance of the wicked in the 
other world as recorded in the Book of Wisdom, ch. V, 6: 
" Ergo erravimus, etc." — " Therefore, we have strayed from 
the way of truth." 

54. We all love little children, as Christ did. They are 
a revelation of God. God is in the artlessness of their 
ways, in the beauty of their eyes, and especially in the 
innocence of their hearts. God Himself is, in a way, as a 
child, in His simplicity — there is nothing complicated about 
Him, and that is why it is so easy to serve Him. "... and 
a little child shall lead them." (Isaiah xi-6). Oscar 
Wilde, in his " De Prof undis " dates the beginning of his 
conversion, or of the realization of how it is possible to 
suffer and be happy, from the day on which they took his 
children away from him. In his new-found humiliation, he 
wrote : " The body of a child is as the body of the Lord, 
and I am unworthy of either." One of Longfellow's most 
graceful poems is called " The Children's Hour." And Tom 
Hood, relating his childhood experience (I remember, I 
remember, the house where I was born) tells how he 
thought the fir-tree tops touched the sky, and concludes 
with: 

" It was a childish ignorance, 
But now, 't is little joy 
To know I'm farther off from Heaven 
Than when I was a boy." 

We all feel like that,— so true is it that " Heaven lies about 



TEXT AND NOTES 47 

us in our infancy." (Wordsworth — " Ode to Immortal- 
ity"). 

55. Something. — ^The repetition of the word denotes 
vagueness of expectancy. 

Replies. — i. e., to his own hopes, half-expressed. 

56. They. — The little children. As tho' he would say: 
" Surely God will leave them to me, since * theirs is the 
Kingdom of Heaven'." 

57. Me. — Cognate accusative. 

Wistfully. — Wishfully, longingly, but without any 
great hopes. 

58. Sudden. — For suddenly; might qualify grew or fair 
with slight difference of meaning. 

59. Dawning answers. — Expresses vagueness, as some- 
thing in line 55. 

60. This line seems to have reference to an incident re- 
lated in the last chapter of the Book of Daniel, namely, 
how the angel of the Lord brought the Prophet Habacuc (by 
the hair of the head ! ) from Judea to Babylon with food 
for Daniel. 

Query 1. Why should the angel pluck the children so 
away? Perhaps, to save the children. In any case, God 
always gives a mighty wrench to those whom He seeks to 
bring out of danger. 

Query 2. Or does the poet merely mean to state that 
the suddenness of the action implies that his own delusion 
or illusion was as short-lived as is the innocence of chil- 
dren? Because, when their eyes grow sudden fair (and 
they know it) with dawning answers there, sin is not far 
away, and then it is farewell to innocence and their like- 
ness to God, which is the secret of their charm. 

It is a pity that the poet did not tell us here as 
much of his experiences with these children, as he did of 
his experiences with Nature's. It would have been beauti- 
ful. Cf. Thompson Sister Songs and other Poems. 

The pathos of this incident reminds one of the wordg 
of Thomas Moore in " The Fire-Worshippers : " 



48 TEXT AND NOTES 

" Oh ! ever thus from childhood's hour, 

I've seen my fondest hopes decay; 
I never loved a tree or flower, 

But 't was the first to fade away. 
I never nursed a dear gazelle. 

To glad me with its soft black eye, 
But when it came to know me well. 

And love me, it was sure to die ! '* 

61-62. "Come then, ye other children, Nature's — share 
With me" (said I) "your delicate fellow- 
ship! . . . ." 

61. The scene changes with an invitation to Nature's 
children. They can never sin, and consequently, are alioays 
a manifestation of God. Nature's children are the air, the 
earth, the sea, the sky, the light, the darkness and their 
various changes and manifestations. Cf. Burns (Epistle to 
Simpson) : 

"O Nature! a' thy shews an' forms 
To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms! — 
Whether the summer kindly warms, 

Wi' life an' light. 
Or winter howls, in gusty storms. 
The lang, dark night ! " 

62. Delicate. — In the sense of the French " d§licat " — 
dainty; cf. taintless (line 70). 

63-69. Let me greet you lip to lip. 

Let me twine with you caresses, 

Wantoning 
With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses, 

Banqueting 
With her in her wind-walled palace, 
Underneath her azured dais, 

63-64. Marks of the greatest intimacy, — kisses and ca- 
resses. 



TEXT AND NOTES 49 

Greet. — To salute or welcome. Cf. St. Paul (I 
Cor. xvi-20) : " Greet one another with a holy kiss." 

Twine. — Entwine, enfold. 

Caresses. — Acts of endearment, chiefly embraces. 
Gr. Katarezzo. 

65-66. Wantoning. — Disporting, revelling. This whole 
picture always reminds me of Murlllo's " Our Lady of the 
Apocalypse," more generally known as the " Immaculate 
Conception." It is a revel of angels, about the feet of the 
great Lady-Mother. 

Lady-Mother. — i. e.. Nature. 

Vagrant. — Latin, " vagare " — to stray, to wander. 
It gives the idea of tresses, curls, straying upon the cheek 
or brow, fresh and fair, with a happy, careless way of be- 
coming untidy. It is an expressive word, and richly bears 
out the idea contained in wantoning. 

Tresses. — Ringlets. Some derive the word from 
the Greek " trissos," threefold, as a tress is usually formed 
by interlacing three pieces. 

67. Banqueting. — Feasting uproariously, yet most refin- 
edly. 

68-69. Wind-walled palace and azured dais both have 
reference to the open skies where the revels of Nature are 
held. 

Wind-walled. — The Palace of the Skies has no 
limit save the winds that blow. 

Azured. — Colored blue, the color of the skies, 
"bleu celeste," called by painters. Azure is a blue pig- 
ment consisting of glass, fused with oxide of cobalt and 
ground to powder. 

Dais. — Originally a raised platform at the end of 
a hall for the table of honor. Then it came to mean the 
table itself, and without losing either signification, is em- 
ployed also (as here) in the sense of a canopy (over an 
altar or throne). The " s " is soft in the pronunciation. 

70-79. Quaffing, as your taintless way is, 

From a chalice 



50 TEXT AND NOTES 

Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring." 

So it was done 
/, in their delicate fellowship was one — 
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies. 
I knew all the swift importings 
On the wilful face of skies ; 
I knew how the clouds arise, 
Spumed of the wild sea-snortings ; 

70. Quaffing. — Drinking copiously, in long draughts. A 
good old English word. 

Taintless way. — Dainty fashion. Cf. Goldsmith (De- 
serted Village) : 

" And the coy maid half willing to be prest, 
Shall kiss the cup to pass it to the next." 

71. Chalice. — Cup, usually of some rich material. We 
say "chalice" of a flower, in Botany, "calyx." 

72. Lucent-weeping. — Lucent, from the Latin, "lucere" 
— to shine. Lucent-tveeping, therefore, conveys the idea of 
dripping and overflowing with light (they drink the sun- 
shine, — it is a pretty figure) after having been steeped and 
filled in the dayspring. 

Dayspring. — ^The fountain of light, the sun or the 
dawn. Cf. Job, xxxviii-12 (Protestant version): "Hast 
thou commanded the morning since the days and caused 
the dayspring (Vulgate — "the dawning of the day") to 
know his place? " 

73-74. He is become one of them, a happy, careless child 
of Nature. 

75. Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies. — ^This was his 
mistake. All who draw this bolt too often or too much, or 
nearly all, fail to reach God, (of course, the poet's wish was 
to escape from Him) because they fail to " look thro' nature 
up to nature's God." (Pope — " Essay on Man "), God keeps 
the secret of Himself well, — He will not be questioned as to 
how and why. He just reveals to His " little ones." The 
Psalmist seems to think so (Psalm 70) : " Because I have 



TEXT AND NOTES 51 

not known learning (literaturam — literature?), I will enter 
into the powers (secrecies, secrets) of the Lord;" and a 
Kempis (Book I): "If thou didst know the whole Bible 
outwardly, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what 
would it all profit thee without charity and the grace of 
God." 

76. Swift importings. — The frequent different manifesta- 
tions, — the lights and shades. 

77. Wilful. — Capricious, changeful. 

Face of skies. — Cf. Line 95 : Heaven's grey cheek. 
79. Spumed. — Cast up, as foam or froth. Cf. fume. 

80-86. All that's born or dies 

Rose and drooped with; made them shapers 
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine — 
With them joyed and was bereaven. 
I was heavy with the even, 
When she lit her glimmering tapers 
Round the day's dead sanctities. 

80-81. That is, " I rose and drooped with all that rose and 
drooped ; " — he learned the secrets of life and death, the 
mysteries of Nature. 

81-82. Made Them shapers divine. — His own 

moods took on the color of the expression of Nature. Hood, 
in his ** Ode to Melancholy," says : 

" Come let us sit and watch the sky. 
And fancy clouds where no clouds be." 

Children amuse themselves with fancies in the glow- 
ing embers in the fire-grate ; " Faces in the fire " is my own 
earliest recollection. 

Wailful. — Sorrowful; is a poor antithesis to the 
word divine, in its literal sense. By divine, is meant, of 
course, the higher feelings which we experience at times, 
each of us, on those rare days when we feel it is good to be 
alive, and would hate to die. 

83. Joyed. — To rejoice, be glad. Cf. Hab. iii (Protestant 
version) : " I will joy in the God of my salvation." 



52 TEXT AND NOTES 

85-86. A beautiful simile. — Night, In the silence of her 
sorrow, lighting the glimmering tapers of the stars around 
the bier of a dead day, the sanctuary of a light and of a 
love departed. Thompson was a Catholic, and this custom 
of the ' chapelle ardente ' was familiar to him. 

85. Lit for lighted, is obsolete or colloquial. 
Glimmering tapers. — Cf. Robert Buchanan (Book of 

Orm — of the stars) : 

" Ah ! the lamps numberless, 
The mystical jewels of God, 
The luminous, wonderful, 

Beautiful Lights of the Veil ! " 

86. Day's dead sanctities. — Like so many of Thompson's 
expressions, this is one of which we feel, rather than per- 
ceive, the meaning. Sanctities could mean sanctuary or the 
relics of the departed day — relics are holy. 

87-95. I laughed in the morning's eyes. 

I triumphed and I saddened with all weather, 

Heaven and I wept together, 
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine; 
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart 
I laid my own to beat, 
And share commingling heat; 
But not by that, by that, was eased my human 

smart. 
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey 
cheek. 

87. Smile kindling smile, and joy, joy. 

88-89. It is the privilege and pain of all highly strung 
people to be influenced by the changes of the weather. Any- 
thing that bores or is tiresome is proverbially said to be as 
" long as a wet Sunday." 

90. Sweet tears. — The tears of heaven, the rain-drops, 
have no cause to be bitter. Our tears are salt in the natural 
physical sense, and bitter in the sense that they usually 
spring from some painful emotion. 



TEXT AND NOTES 53 

Mortal. — Deadly, painful, bitter. 
91-95. The glowing heart of heaven has not the responsive 
human heart throb which human love demands; therefore, 
to share commingling heat and be consoled, was literally im- 
possible; for the same reason, his tears fell idly upon the 
cold, grey unresponsive cheek of heaven. 

Red. — Applying to throh, is an example of trans- 
ferred epithet, as it really applies to sunset-heart. 

Sunset heart. — Strange combination of words, and 
•though the meaning is evident and quite natural, it is one 
of those expressions which only poets find. 

My own. — i. e., my own heart. 

Commingling heat. — Share is like to heat, infini- 
tive mood, having my own (heart) for subject. He was 
longing for a heart-to-heart intercourse with Nature. Any- 
thing but God ! 

Smart. — A quick, pungent, lively pain. 

Were wet. — Again the transferred epithet, because 
it is the grey cheek of Heaven which was wet. 

Grey. — The dullest of colors — nothing warm about 
it. Nevertheless, like everything God has made, it has its 
own perfection and charm. Cf. the grey dawn, or the grey 
twilight, — but grey skies are sad. 

9&-104. For ah! we know not what each other says. 
These things and I ; in sound / speak — 
Their sound is but their stir, they speak in 

silences. 
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth; 

Let her, if she would owe me, 
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me 

The breasts o' her tenderness: 
Never did any milk of hers once bless 

My thirsting month. 

96-97. Thompson blames the heavens for unresponsive- 
ness, but he was seeking from them what they could not 
give. To ask too much, even of a friend, is dangerous to 



54 TEXT AND NOTES 

friendship. But the soul that is closed to God will never 
find any answer in Nature, for Nature is God's mirror. Cf. 
Wordsworth (Peter Bell) : 

" A primrose by a river's brim 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more." 

98. Silences. — ^The silences of which he complains are, 
nevertheless, filled with God. Byron, who loved God so very 
little, was impressed by them, — (Childe Harold) : 

" There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is a rapture on the lonely shore. 
There is society, where none intrudes. 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar." 

99. Stepdame. — He is tired of her, and so, pities her. 
Why is the adjective "poor" used to express pity? It is 
found in all languages. Stepmothers are proverbially hard- 
hearted and unkind. 

Slake. — Slacken, allay. 

Drouth. — Thirst, (akin to drink, draught). One of 
the prettiest things in the history of art is the prayer of 
Palestrina for his nephew, that God would grant him the 
sacred hunger for the ideal. It was Palestrina's own pain 
that he could never give, in even his music, the full sense or 
sentiment of the ideal harmonies that haunted his mind. 
They were too filled with God for human expression. Alas ! 
for all our ideals ! 

100. Owe me. — Own me, claim me as her child or her 
slave. 

101-102. The sky was formerly Mother Nature's canopy; 
now, it is wound around her as a garment. Only to poets 
is this license permitted. The expression is pretty. 

103-104. He was disappointed from the beginning, and this 
was his sin ; — he knew he would be. Wordsworth, the great 
lover of Nature, came to a different conclusion (Tintern 
Abbey) : 



TEXT AND NOTES 55 

" Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her." 

105-111. Nigh and nigh draws the chase, 
With unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
And past those nois6d Feet 
A Voice comes yet more fleet — 
"Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not 

Me." 
Naked I wait Thy Love's uplifted stroke ! 
105-110. Nigh and nigh. — Nearer and nearer come the 
Feet of God. " Chaser " would be logically more correct 
here. Although Nature did not console or shelter him, 
nevertheless, she brought him nearer to God, for the Voice 
" more fleet " has now passed ahead of the ring of the Feet, 
and is calling out to him, what he was hiding from himself, 
namely, that it is contentment he is seeking, not shelter from 
God. 

110. It is an echo of the famous aspiration of St. Augus- 
tin (Confessions): "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O 
Lord, and our heart is forever unrested, until it rest in 
Thee." 

111. Now, indeed, he has tempted all God's servitors, but 
in vain! He is on the cross; will he, or will he not, accept? 
He is face to face with what the " Imitation of Christ " 
says no one can escape : " The Cross of Christ." A re- 
viewer of the poem in the " Bookman," struck the keynote 
of criticism when he said : " It is the return of the nine- 
teenth century to Thomas a Kempis." Cf. Imitation, Book 
II, Ch. 12. 

Naked. — Deprived of everything, even of hope. This 
is the climax of the poem. 

I wait. — Await. Some years ago, an active and 
rather acrid discussion was carried on, as to the relative 
merits of the active and passive virtues. It is the old 
question of Martha and Mary. Both were saints, but Mary, 
the passive, chose " the better part." The sooner we put our- 



56 TEXT AND NOTES 

selves completely in God's hands, the better, doing at the 
same time all we can to co-operate with His graces. 

Thy. — This is the first time he speaks to God in the 
second person. 

Love's uplifted stroke. — It is much to acknowledge 
even that it is God's love which causes us to suffer. 

112-123. My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from 
me, 
And smitten me to my knee; 
I am defenceless utterly. 

I slept, methinks, and woke, 
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep. 
In the rash lustihead of my young powers, 

I shook the pillaring hours 
And pulled my life upon me ; grimed with smears, 
I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years — 
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. 
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke, 
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream. 

112. Harness. — A word found in old romances, meaning 
armor. (It is much more prosaic now in signification, mean- 
ing the collection of articles used for yoking animals to 
wagons.) Tennyson (Morte d' Arthur) "Dry clash'd his 
harness in the icy caves." 

Piece by piece. — The knights' armour was composed 
of several pieces, notably the shield, helmet, breastplate, 
gauntlets, and greaves. This necessitated an esquire or 
armour-bearer, who attended the knight, and carried his 
fighting equipment which he buckled on his master before 
the combat. 

Hewn. — Hacked away, as if with a sword. 

113. Smitten. — Past participle of "to smite" — to strike. 
Cf. Tennyson (Morte d' Arthur) : ". . . . smitten thro' the 
helm." 

To my knee. — Position of defeat, as well as of sup- 
plication. 

114. I am defenceless utterly. — He is now very near to 



TEXT AND NOTES 57 

God, without Whom we can do absolutely nothing. This is 
a terrible revelation to some souls, (for we are all Pelagians 
at heart, and would wish to be able to work out our salva- 
tion without God's grace) — the fact that with all their striv- 
ing, they get no closer to God, for they hit wide of the 
mark all the time by not preparing for and awaiting God's 
coming to them. What we can and must do is to co-operate 
with God's grace. 

115. The awakening from the dream of his life. It seems 
to him that heretofore his life was but a dream, and now he 
realizes it. 

116-123. All this passage is a parallel to the incident re- 
lated of Samson in the Book of Judges, Chapter XVI. 
Samson's strength was in his hair, and while he was sleeping, 
he was shorn of his hair, and so of his strength, by Delilah. 
(The poet, too, was stripped in sleep, and awoke defenceless 
utterly.) Samson was then taken prisoner by his old ene- 
mies, the Philistines, and his eyes were plucked out. (The 
poet, too, on his awakening found himself sloioly gazing 
like a blind man. ) Samson was finally brought one day into 
the temple of the Philistine god, Dagon, to be mocked. Call- 
ing on God for strength, he laid hands on the pillars sup- 
porting the building, and, shaking them, he pulled the temple 
in ruins, both on the Philistines and on himself. (So, too, 
with one great effort, — perhaps it was the effect of prayer, — 
in his address to God, Naked, I ivait Thy Love's uplifted 
stroke, the poet shook the supports of the temple he had 
built for himself of his hopes and longings, and brought it 
down in ruins about him. ) 

117. Lustihead. — Lustihead, vigour of body, headstrong 
strength, energy. 

Young powers. — Freshly recovered strength. 

118. Pillaring hours. — See Line 2, arches of years. 

119. Pulled my life upon me. — ^The ruin of the temple. 
Grimed. — Begrimed, smeared. 

Smears. — Stains, usually caused by some viscous sub- 
stance. 



58 TEXT AND NOTES 

120. I stand. — Can you imagine a ruin more complete? 
Mounded. — Heaped up. 

120-123. These lines are a fitting conclusion to this pas- 
sage. They have all the lyricism of Hebrew poetry about 
them. Each line expresses the same idea, the complete ruin 
of the fabric of his life, with a parallelism that is distinct- 
ively the trait of the poetry of the East. Cf . Psalm ci : 

V. 4. — For my days are vanished like smoke; and my 
bones are grown dry like fuel for the fire. 

V. 5. — I am smitten as grass, and my heart is with- 
ered 

V. 6. — Through the voice of my groaning, my bone hath 
cleaved to my flesh. 

V. 7. — I am become like to a pelican ... a night-raven, 
.... a sparrow all alone, etc. 

But Thompson's lines have a newness about them 
which almost makes us forget what the Psalmist felt and 
sang so long before him. They come "from the depth of 
some divine despair." 

123. Puffed and burst. — How often have we seen this, and 
would have wished to express it so ! 

Sun-starts. — Flashes of sunlight on the water, 
through the overhanging trees. 

124-125. Yea, faileth now even dream 

The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist; 

124-125. He is at length wide-awake, face to face with 
the reality of God's love. 

Lute.— A musical instrument of the guitar kind, 
resembling in shape the horizontal section of a large pear, 
with a back like a mandolin ; much used in the 16th and 17th 
centuries. Tradition associates it with love-songs, dream- 
songs. Cf. Vivien's song to Merlin in Tennyson's " Idylls of 
the King " : 

" * In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours, 

Unf aith in aught Is want of faith in all. 



TEXT AND NOTES 59 

It is the little rift within the lute, 

That bye and bye will make the music mute. 

And trust me not at all or all in all.' " 

What the lute is doing in this particular connec- 
tion, I can scarcely say, except it be that the stern reality 
forces him to think he can no longer sing. 
126-130. These lines pursue the same thought. 

Linked phantasies — blossoniy twist. — Convey 
the same idea, only reversed: *' Phantasies {fancies) llos- 
somy; linked and tivist both refer to his song. He can no 
longer sing or rhapsodize for, as he states, the poetical fan- 
cies by which, as if by strings of flowers, he bound all things 
to him, are now yielding. 

Trinket at my wrist. — The word " trinket " is of 
uncertain origin, but in our language it has come to mean 
a small ornament, particularly of Goldsmith's work. Strong 
in his imagination, he thought he was lord of the earth. 
But, now, that dream has gone. In the Greek Mythology, 
Europa held Jupiter (in the form of a white bull) very fast, 
and guided him thro' the meadows by means of a string of 
flowers. But the story tells how he finally dashed into the 
sea, and swam away with her. She trusted too much to the 
hlossomp twist. And, indeed, in all our loves, we are bound 
only by a fragile string of flowers, as it were, which one day 
will go to pieces. We are " bound with gold chains about the 
feet of God," alone. Thompson tried to break these chains, 
and he failed. 

Yielding. — Giving way. 

Cords of all too weak account. — Of too little 
strength entirely to be taken into account. 

Heavy griefs. — Sorrow is the principal element 
in our lives which disentangles us from the earth, and the 
earth is, indeed, heavy with it. 

Overplussed. — Verb formed from noun "over- 
plus " — excess. 



6o TEXT AND NOTES 

131-140. Ah ! is Thy love indeed 

A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed, 
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount? 
Ah ! must — 
Designer infinite ! — 
Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst 

limn with it? 
My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the 
dust ; 
And now my heart is as a broken fount, 
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down 
ever 
From the dank thoughts that shiver 
Upon the sighful branches of my mind. 

130-132. This is his first genuine thought of God, and it 
is a bitter one. He is beginning to refiect. He calls God's 
love by the ugly name of weed. Weeds, as a matter of fact, 
choke up all other vegetation, and the strongest crowd out 
the weakest. " 111 weeds grow apace." 

Albeit. — Although. Cf. so be it. 
Amaranthine. — Adjective derived from "am- 
aranth" (Gr. undecaying) a plant, or rather a genus of 
plants of several species. In poetry it is always under- 
stood as an imaginary fiower, which never fades, i. e., it 
retains its color (purple) for a long time. Cowper writes: 

" The only amaranthine fiower on earth 
Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth." 

(The Garden) 
Tennyson, in "The Lotos-eaters," sets this 
flower among those which surround the throne of the couch 
of the dreamers. 

Suffering no other flowers mount. — 

This is no revelation to him, only he tried to forget it, be- 
cause he has already stated (lines 22, 23) — 

" But, if one little casement parted wide. 
The gust of His approach would clash it to." 



TEXT AND NOTES 6i 

133-135. The great secret of our relations with God is 
that Christ came to save the world, but He came to save 
it with the Cross and that, consequently, as St. Paul states 
it, " we must resemble the image of the Son." The process 
is a bitter one for human nature, and it is sometimes as 
painful as burning, — the rooting out of our nature all that 
is contrary to God, before God can make use of us for our- 
selves, for others, or for Himself. 

Designer infinite. — Cf. The Great Architect of 
the Masons. 

Char. — Burn. Charcoal is used by painters to 
draw the outlines of their subjects on the canvas. 

Ere. — Before. 

Limn. — Latin, "illuminare" — to draw or 
sketch. 

136-140. Another much involved passage, although the 
meaning is almost evident. He compares his heart to a 
fountain, which spent its freshness in the dust and dross 
of things which are not God. It is grown old and broken, 
a receptacle only for occasional drops from the overhang- 
ing leaves. 

137. My heart is as a broken fount. — There is a pathos 
about this line even deeper than in line 114 — defenceless 
utterly — because the agony is no longer from without, but 
from within, — a hroken fount. Ruins are always sad. 

138-147. Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever 
From the dank thoughts that shiver 
Upon the sighful branches of my mind. 

Such is; what is to be? 
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind? 
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; 
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
From the hid battlements of eternity: 
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then 
Bound the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash 
again ; 



62 TEXT AND NOTES 

138. Tear-drippings stagnate. — Because these are the 
useless tears, put to no purpose, and so they stagnate, grow- 
ing more rank and bitter. 

139-140. These two lines in my estimation are the weak- 
est in the poem. The metaphor is too bold; and yet, they 
complete the picture of desolation and ruin. 

139. Dank. — Moist, clammy. Washington Irving, in his 
" Sketch Book," speaking of English scenery, mentions urns 
" grown green and dank with age," mildewed. DanTc 
thoughts is certainly a far-fetched expression. 

140. Sighful. — Full of sighs, sad, lonely. 

Branches of my mind. — ^The metaphor is too bold; 
yet, it is picturesque and expressive. I have seen in the 
old churchyards of Ireland ruins of churches all covered 
with ivy, and have imagined how lonely it must be to hear 
the winds sighing there at night. 

141. Is this the recklessness of hope or of despair? 

142. Pulp— rind.— Cf. of a fruit. He has tasted of the 
pulp and found it bitter. Is the rind God? 

143. Eternity is drawing closer. Time is but its dawn, 
the misty dawn. 

144-147. These lines remind me of another famous 
picture: Romney's " Piel Castle" (in a storm). But the 
beauty of Thompson's lines is all his own. It is the trum- 
pet-call, the summons from the castle-walls, before the draw- 
bridge is let down, so familiar to any reader of Sir Walter 
Scott. But the ramparts are here those of eternity. The 
blast of the trumpet shakes the mists apart, the mists in 
which time confounds everything, and a fleeting glimpse is 
caught of the towers and parapets of eternity before the 
mists wash back again. The whole thing is gorgeous in its 
imagery. One has only to shut one's eyes to see and hear it 
all. The drawbridge will soon be let down, and the poor 
worn-out stranger will be welcomed to the Heart of the 
Lord of lords and King of kings. 

144. Ever and anon. — Now and again. Anon means 
quickly, soon. The Americans say " Once in a while," 



TEXT AND NOTES 63 

145. Battlements. — Originally constructed for defense; 
now used only as ornaments in architecture. 

147. Wash. — A very expressive word used, of course, not 
in the active sense. Trailing mist clouds are often seen 
along the sides of mountains, and can be easily imagined in 
this picture. Tennyson (Morte d' Arthur) makes use of the 
word " wash " in this sense : 

" * I heard the water lapping on the crag. 
And the long ripple washing in the reeds.' " 
And we say " back-wash " of a wave. 
148-154. But not ere him who summoneth 

I first have seen, enwound 
With glooming robes purpurea!, cypress-crowned ; 
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith. 
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields 
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields 
Be dunged with rotten death? 
148-150. He catches his first glimpse of God, and God 
looks terrible to him. 

149. Enwound. — Clothed, garbed, encased in. 

150. Glooming robes purpurea!. — Dark, but they have 
the royal color, purple, purpurea!. Note the majesty ex- 
pressed in this line. 

Cypress-crowned. — Wearing a crown of cypress 
leaves. Cypresses are distinguished from firs and pines by 
their leaves being mere scales, miniature ramifications. 
These leaves are easily woven into a crown, owing to their 
shape. The cypress is usually connected in our minds with 
death and cemeteries, but the reason is that on account of 
its ever-greenness, it is a symbol, not of death, but of im- 
mortality. And God is immortal. 

151. His name I know. — God gave His Name to Moses — 
" I am Who am," and philosophy teaches that God is ex- 
actly that, identically the same in essence and existence. 

152-154. What His trumpet saith. — The message, which 
is the message of Christ to the world. 
152-154. This is the message. John xii-24, 25; "Amen, 



64 TEXT AND NOTES 

amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into 
the ground, die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it 
bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose 
it, and he that hateth his life in this world, keepeth it unto 
life eternal." Now, life springs from the seed, but alas ! the 
seed must first rot and die. It is a universal law in nature, 
summed up by St. Thomas : " Corruptio unius, generatio 
alterius," — " corruption and generation are simultaneous." 
It is so, too, in the ways God has with our souls and our 
lives. If ever God is to reap a harvest from us, it will be 
only if the harvest field is dunged with the dead bodies of 
our own achievements. God builds upon nothing and noth- 
ingness, just as He created from nothing and nothingness. 
154. Death. — Dead things. 

155-176. Now of that long pursuit 

Comes on at hand the bruit; 
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea: 

"And is thy earth so marred, 

Shattered in shard on shard? 
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me! 

Strange, piteous, futile thing! 
Wherefore, should any set thee love apart? 
Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He 

said) 
"And human love needs human meriting: 

How hast thou merited — 
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot? 

Alack, thou knowest not 
How little worthy of any love thou art! 
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, 

Save Me, save only Me? 
All which I took from thee I did but take, 

Not for thy harms. 
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. 

All which thy child's mistake 
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: 

Rise, clasp My hand, and come." 



TEXT AND NOTES 65 

155. The chase is drawing to a close. 

156. Bruit.— Indistinct noise, report, rumor; French, 
"bruit" rarely used in English, 

157. Bursting sea. — Cf. Tennyson (Crossing the Bar) : 

" But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
Too full for sound and foam." 
That is, full to bursting. 
158-176. What the Voice of God says explaining — 

(a) The external causes of our sufferings (in 
lines 158-160), namely, we put our confidence in things 
outside of us, which are not God, and suffer when we are 
deprived of them. 

(&) The internal cause of our sufferings (in 
lines 161-170), namely our need of love and our unworthi- 
ness of any love, despite which we, nevertheless, expect to 
be loved. Oscar Wilde in " De Profundis," came to the 
conclusion that no one deserves to be loved except the one 
who counts himself unworthy of all love; and furthermore, 
he beautifully says that the wonderful thing about God's 
love is that it is " eternally given to that which is eternally 
unworthy." 

(c) The final cause, (i. e., the reason why we 
suffer) of our sufferings (in lines 171-176), namely, that 
God permits us to suffer externally and internally that we 
may seek Hi/tn, and our happiness in Him. 

158. Marred. — Disfigured, ruined, shattered, wrecked. 

159. Shard on shard. — Shard is broken pottery; cf. Pot- 
sherd. There is a hillock on the banks of the Tiber, near 
Rome, called Monte Testaccio (Latin, "testa," — an earthen- 
ware pot or jug. Horace addresses, in the Odes, his wine- 
jar as " pia-testa " — "loving-cup") formed entirely from 
pieces of broken pottery. I understand it was on this spot 
that the boats unloaded grain which they brought in earth- 
enware receptacles. I submit this observation to show that 
the poet's simile is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Be- 
sides, human life and human hopes have been often com- 
pared, on account of their fragility, to clay vessels. It is 



66 TEXT AND NOTES 

frequent in the Bible. Omar Khayyam in his " Rubayiat " 
would have us nothing else than such clay vessels, some beau- 
tifully and some villainously formed by the Potter. As for 
himself, he states that he " was never deep in anything but — 
wine." It is the most pagan of poems. I prefer that little 
song of Longfellow's, *' Turn, turn, my wheel," inserted in his 
poem " Keramos " — it is Christian. In it we find : 

" These vessels made of clay. 



Behind us in our path we cast 
The broken potsherds of the past." 

160. This is the return to the "Imitation of Christ" 
(Book I, Ch. I) : "Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity, 
but to love God and serve Him alone." 

161. Strange, piteous, futile. — Words full of tender 
commiseration. Strange — in thought, desire and action; 
piteous — pitiable for so many " child's mistakes ; " futile 
— of no account in all its efforts, for " without Me you can 
do nothing." 

Thing. — A word so full of pity; it is the climax of 
the line. 

162-168. Why should anyone ever love us? When we 
love anyone, it is not so much the object of our love whom 
we love, as that very person as he seems to us. Our own 
loving imagination makes him lovable, and love is an act 
of the will. That is why human love, purely human love, 
is generally so selfish, because our love for others is thus 
only a modification of our love for ourselves. And be- 
sides, that is why so many are disappointed. A day comes 
when the dear object of our love and affection stands re- 
vealed in all its weakness and native vileness, — he was 
only clay, and we did not know it, — and that is the day 
of disillusionment and disenchantment. Love, therefore, 
that is only human — from man to man — ^is the adoration 
of the idol of clay. " Why, then," indeed, " should any set 
thee love apart? " 



TEXT AND NOTES 67 

163. Too true! The world does not take nauglit into ac- 
count. But, strange to say, God does. St. Paul found it 
out long ago (I Cor. 1-27, 28) : "But the foolish things of 
the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the wise. 
And the weak things of the world hath God chosen that He 
may confound the strong. And the base things of the 
world, and the things that are contemptible, hath God 
chosen and things that are not, that He might bring to 
naught the things that are. ..." 

164. God's love alone is given freely. Cf. Lowell (Vision 
of Sir Launfal) : 

*' 'T is heaven alone that is given away, 
'T is only God may be had for the asking." 

165. How hast thou merited. — Thou art no greater, no 
better than thy fellows, since "every heart is human, and 
made of the same clay." 

166. Clotted clay.— Puddled earth. 

Dingiest. — Dingy means dusky, brownish — here, of 
course, soiled and soiling. 

167-168. This is the " last straw " in the close reasoning 
of God: our great unworthiness. It falls on the soul from 
the lips of God like a machine hammer, reducing what is 
left of the miserable being to powder, to clay! 
Alack. — Alas; cf. lack-a-day. 

169-170. If Thompson had written nothing more than 
these two lines, he would have merited our gratitude for- 
ever. Whom, indeed, could we ever find to love us, if all 
were known and said, and done, except God, except our 
good, good God! "Save Me, save only Me!'* These are 
God-like words. 

171-173. THE REVELATION: God deprives the soul of 
everything so that the soul may go to Him for everything. 

172. Not for thy harms. — Not to hurt or harm thee, not 
for the sake of making thee suffer. And this is why suffer- 
ing is the true mark of God's chosen souls : His love for us 
causes Him to make us suffer, — and how badly we under- 
stand His love! 



68 TEXT AND NOTES 

173-End. But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. 
All which thy child's mistake 
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home : 
Rise, clasp My hand, and come." 

Halts by me that footfall; 
Is my gloom, after all. 
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly? 
" Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, 
I am He whom thou seekest! 
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me." 

173-175. THE CONSOLATION. We seek God because we 
are made for Him alone, even in our sins because we seek 
" good " when we sin, and God is the Supreme " Good." The 
mistake we make — God calls it a child's mistake — but it is a 
terrible one (and a child would not make it) — is to seek God 
where God is not, and can never be. And when the '* good " 
we seek, even in our sins, leaves us and betrays us, God will 
tell us that if we turn to Him, we shall find all we sought 
and sought in vain, stored for us at home, with Him in 
Heaven, in His arms. 

176. Rise, clasp My hand, and come. — It is the invitation 
in the beautiful second chapter of the Canticle of Canticles, 
V. 13 : " Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come." It 
is the life of all the saints, in one line: to arise from the 
earth, clasp God's hand tight, and walk forever hand in 
hand with Him. Happy those who heed God's invitation! 

177. Halts by me that footfall. — ^The race is over and 

God has won It is the peace of God, the peace 

which the world cannot know or give. 

178-179. All our sorrows are, indeed, if we only knew, — 
once again our child's mistake, — the shadow of God's hand 
stretched out to bless, and — to caress. 

180-182. These lines sound like the echoing of the " Lost 
Chord " of Adelaide Proctor : " The sound of a great 
Amen ! " 

Fondest. — Fond originally meant foolish. 



W5S 



TEXT AND NOTES 69 

181. THE CONSOLATION. No blame for the straying 
one, only ineffable tenderness, and a great welcome. 
" Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavily laden, 
and I will refresh you." 

182. And this is the last word of everything: 

GOD IS LOVE.— 
Thank God that it is so! 








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